


another broken-hearted good morning to the good side of your ghost

by blushandbooks



Category: Julie and The Phantoms (TV)
Genre: F/M, Jukebox, and have a nice emotional moment to yourself, and it is not graphic, get a tissue box, get tissues, juke, major character death warning is only for the boys crossing over, this fic is for sad bitches only, this is sad i cannot deny
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-08
Updated: 2020-12-08
Packaged: 2021-03-10 01:28:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27962297
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blushandbooks/pseuds/blushandbooks
Summary: what happens when the boys cross over, and what julie makes of it.
Relationships: Julie Molina/Luke Patterson
Comments: 75
Kudos: 177





	another broken-hearted good morning to the good side of your ghost

**Author's Note:**

> An edited version of this (https://blush-and-books.tumblr.com/post/636879142869139456/the-end-of-julie-and-the-phantoms-a-very-long) headcanon/theory that I cowrote with @willexx on Tumblr. Now written more as a fic, but still emotional. 
> 
> Title from "Another Summer Night Without You" by Alexander 23. If you want a sad bitch summer, that song is the way to go.

**~the night it happens + the morning after~**

After a little over a year, the boys are ready to cross over. 

They don’t know how, or why now, or what’s next -- but they know the pull that they feel deep in their soul is not to be ignored. It’s a heartbreaking moment that they prayed they would never have to face -- they’re crying, Julie is sobbing, and the tug is intensifying with every shaky breath in between tears. With one last “we love you, Julie,” a flash of light overtakes the garage space, nearly blinding Julie.

The next thing she knows, Julie lying in bed, waking up from her ringing alarm. 

Confusion seeps into her bones, a definite feeling of discomfort crawling at her skin with the question of how she got to bed last night after… The boys left. She reaches for her phone to turn off her alarm – it’s a school day – she quickly notices the date:

It’s October 20, 2020. The same day that she met the boys, that she was going to clean out her mom’s garage, and that she had to perform to keep her spot in the music program. 

Panic, sheer panic, makes her head spin. 

_ No, _ she tells herself,  _ it had to be real. It was real, they were real, please tell me they were real- _

She breaks down in cries, and scrambles around her room for any proof that her phone is glitching, it isn’t actually a year ago, and that her boys are still here. Ray knocks on the door, wondering what all the noise was -- it was her throwing her books and school supplies around the room to find anything with a date on it -- but he doesn’t come in. If he did, he would observe his daughter’s mental state crumbling before his eyes.

She finds herself dehydrated and exhausted all over again from this early breakdown, and runs her hands over her face, wondering what in the world she’s supposed to do now -- when the cold press of metal against her left cheek stuns her. 

A bold, silver ring is wrapped around her left middle finger. Luke’s ring. 

Alex’s fanny pack is slung across the back of a chair when she looks up, and looks carefully, around her room. 

And Reggie’s leather jacket is hanging in her closet.

But when she runs downstairs, past her concerned father, clad in her dinosaur slippers, rushing to the garage to see if the guys were there – they aren’t.  _ They have crossed over.  _

  
  


And now she’s left to relive the past year of her life with everything they taught her and all of the grieving they helped her with, once upon a time. 

As she moves through the day, she’s a new Julie, but everything else is the same. Instead of a baseball cap and low ponytail, Julie throws on her black jeans and Reggie’s leather and lets her hair run wild. She’s displaying a confidence that Flynn hasn’t seen in a long time, that seemed to have hit Julie overnight. 

She doesn’t have the boys anymore. But she can still make them proud -- and this is her chance to fix things. 

Julie belts  _ Wake Up _ in music, and keeps her spot in the program. She doesn’t oogle Nick in the halls and she tells Carrie off when there’s an attempt at an insult made. 

Real or not, the boys helped her. They did their job. 

When she gets home, and Ray irks her about cleaning the garage or selling the house, she is quick to insist that she doesn’t want to move and that if he needs her for the rest of the night, she’ll be in her mother’s studio.

Returning to the studio, now with renewed focus, takes her breath away. 

There aren’t any instruments except for the piano, and the space has the original layer of dust that it had before her and the guys started using the it again. 

Julie feels empty. 

But she reminds herself that the ring on her finger is real, extremely real, so she retraces her steps that she had taken in the first episode and tracks down the Sunset Curve demo CD, puts it in the stereo, and plays it. 

Nothing happens. Or, at least – nothing that she could see.

Invisible to her, the guys are in the chairs on the ceiling, watching her begin to slowly make her way around and repeat the clean-up process that she had gone through before.

**~the weeks after~**

The boys are real, and they have crossed over, which renders Julie unable to see them. However, in her reset reality without them, no one remembers  _ Julie and the Phantoms _ or the fact that the boys existed in the first place. The boys, while she can’t see them, visit her and try to make contact with her as much as they can, even though their times with her are limited since they are supposed to be on the other side.

She’ll feel a ghost of a touch on her hand or her hair, and know that Luke is there. When she’s in the car and the radio is on a country station, she knows that it’s Reggie. These little notes keep her going, and she’ll just sigh and say “my boys,” and leave everyone around her confused. 

(She hasn’t been able to pinpoint any signs from Alex. She tries not to cry about it late at night.)

Sometimes, when she wakes up in the morning, the demo tape can be heard playing in the garage. Somehow she gets filled with hope that if she runs into the garage, the boys will be there rocking out without her like she used to scold them for left and right – but no one is there. Ray comments that the stereo is broken. Julie has no choice but to nod along and avoid her father’s eyes.

One day she finds Luke’s songbook that had been buried in the plastic garbage bags of the boys’ belongings. She still brings  _ Unsaid Emily _ to his parents, this time without Luke in tow. She cries more than she did the first time she brought it to them, almost breaking down so hard that she excused herself before they could see her fall apart. 

She cries herself to sleep that night. And she keeps his songbook under her pillow.

**~the months after~**

On the two year anniversary of Rose’s passing, Julie finds Luke’s “angst flannel.” Ray asks where she got it; she passively tells him that she dug it out in a thrift store. She feels self-conscious wearing it out around her dad, so it stays tucked away in her room. It feels warm, like all of the guys are there, hugging her; and like Luke is right next to her when she’s writing a song.

Another morning in the future, she could swear that Luke and Reggie are strumming out  _ Flying Solo _ on level one volume, and once again finds herself darting to the garage with no good excuse except to keep her hopes up. They, unsurprisingly, aren’t there – but a note is, that says  _ “You’re a star, Jules. We love you.” _

The handwriting is messy, but it’s the most beautiful thing she’s seen in a long time. She knows it’s from Luke, who probably fought the boys to even write the note because he just wanted to talk to her even though they need to move on and his handwriting is awful. The note gets tucked into the pocket of the flannel, and when she needs to be reminded that she’ll be okay, she pulls it out of the pocket and holds it tight. 

Before every show, she reads the note, and mumbles a little prayer to them wherever they are – even if no one else believes they are real. 

Little notes from Luke appear here and there, but never from any of the guys. In the shadows where she can’t see them, Alex tells Luke that in order for both themselves and Julie to move on, Luke needs to stop leaving her notes – so most of the ones that Julie finds are even more messy than usual, like Luke was trying to write them without the guys noticing. 

“Dude, you’ve gotta cut it out. It’s too much on Julie. We need to let her move on.”

Luke can’t bring himself to. 

“But we’re right here. She needs to know we’re right here-”

“But she’s not, Luke. Let her go.”

“But she knows we’re here, Alex. Didn’t you see yesterday-”

“-How she was crying? Over us? Yeah, I did. It’s because you keep showing up and causing her pain.”

But during one of their forbidden conversations in the dark of her room, Julie says to Luke: 

“Hey, I never told you this before… But I’m so glad you’re here. I don’t know what I would do without knowing that you guys were still around. I think I would have lost my mind. Convinced I was crazy.”

Luke could have ran to Alex, repeated Julie’s tearful words, and given the drummer a fat “I told you so.” But he doesn’t. Julie’s validation is the only validation that he needs. 

Whenever her and Carlos and Ray make an extra seat at their dinner table for Rose, Julie imagines, deep in her mind, that it is for Reggie too. Reggie deserved a seat at their table; deserved to be a part of their family. A family that would have loved him. 

And when a fork falls off of the table, Julie knows he’s there. 

“Hey Dad… How would you feel if you had another son?”

The question is unexpected, unwarranted, and uncontrollable. Julie can’t even look at her dad, pushing her rice around the plate like it’s dirt, and trying to keep her lip from trembling too much. Ray responds with pure confusion, Julie wants to cry, and neither of them bring up the conversation after. She just hopes that Reggie is out there knowing that she misses him. 

When Julie and Flynn go to Pride together, Julie wears Alex’s fanny pack even though she hadn’t gotten any signs from him since they had all moved on. He still doesn’t reach out afterwards, too overwhelmed by her gesture to think of a way to properly extend his gratitude and love for the girl who is keeping his spirit alive – but Luke lets her know that he was grateful. 

And when Julie finds a small little “okay” written in the corners of her songbook, her tears almost wash the word away. 

At some point, within a year of their crossing over, Luke’s flannel starts to lose it’s original sweet scent of Emily and Mitch’s house. Julie spends two hours crying on the floor of her bathroom and refuses to come out for either Carlos or Ray. Her body aches afterwards. And a faded orange beanie appears in her room the next day. 

**~the year[s] after~**

Luke still visits Julie like he visits Emily and Mitch. And on Luke’s birthday every year, Julie goes to a little bakery after school and buys herself a cupcake; sneaking downstairs in the middle of the night to light a candle and sing happy birthday so that Ray doesn’t interrupt and worry that she’s having a seance. 

Her voice is light, and watered down by tears, but beautiful just the same when she sings to him. Once, the first time she lit the candle, the candle got blown out. Every year after that first year, she gets candles that you have to turn on and off so that Luke can’t ruin the moment. 

(He ends up throwing the fake candle on the ground out of retaliation.)

Julie is so emotionally stable for the most part that the complete change is a shock to Ray. He tries to ask her what happened, but she always acts like nothing happened and then hides in her room for hours. Sometimes, she makes random little comments out of the blue, like asking if he believes in ghosts or saying she wants to learn the guitar, drums, and bass. Ray has many conversations with Victoria on whether or not he should have Julie seeing Dr. Turner again. 

When Julie blows up as a solo artist, she actually records  _ Unsaid Emily _ . And  _ Bright.  _ And all of the other songs that her and Luke wrote together. Luke Patterson is in the writing credits for many of the songs, where Trevor Wilson never bothered to list him, and a part of Luke is at peace. 

At her first solo concert, Julie walks into the dressing room to find  _ “Stand Tall” _ written three times, in three different handwriting styles, in red, pink, and blue. The message in blue is the messiest by far, and is followed up with a heart. She's late to call by 10 whole minutes; too delirious from just standing and staring at the note that her boys wrote. 

Always her biggest cheerleaders, even in the afterlife. She saves _Stand Tall_ for last, and cries her way through it.

The name of Julie’s first album is  _ My Phantoms.  _ And if you look closely, the bonus track on the deluxe album is  _ His Name Was Luke.  _

**Author's Note:**

> let me know what you think. I love you all!!!


End file.
